


Promises

by Black_Crystal_Dragon



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Din and Luke don't get on in this fic I'm sorry, Gen, Good Parent Din Djarin, Grogu | Baby Yoda Needs a Hug, How Do I Tag, Luke Skywalker's Jedi Temple, Mentioned Ben Solo, Missing Scene, Parent-Child Relationship, Protective Din Djarin, Rescue, Reunions, Soft Din Djarin, The Mandalorian (TV) Season 2, The Mandalorian (TV) Season 2 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-22 19:21:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30043497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Black_Crystal_Dragon/pseuds/Black_Crystal_Dragon
Summary: When the Jedi temple falls, destroyed by one of its own, the first person to arrive on the scene is a Mandalorian.
Relationships: Din Djarin & Grogu | Baby Yoda
Comments: 11
Kudos: 102





	Promises

**Author's Note:**

> Admission time: I haven’t watched the Sequel Trilogy in a while, so details might be off. Please just go with it.
> 
> Small content warning for the heavily implied deaths of trainee Jedi, though it's nothing more graphic than we get in the films. Also, Ben Solo's canon backstory with his uncle gets discussed.
> 
> Thank you to my lovely best friend [Ice_Elf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ice_Elf) for the beta and encouragement.

The location of the Jedi temple isn’t exactly a secret, but it’s not like it’s common knowledge either. If Din keeps an eye, well. The Jedi and the Mandalorians are old enemies. It makes sense.

It makes less sense for him to climb into a ship and plunge into hyperspace with nothing but his weapons for company when the news comes that the temple has gone up in flames — but there’s no power in the galaxy that could stop him.

* * *

The Jedi temple is still smouldering as the sun comes up. Underneath the scents of smoke and green vegetation, there’s an acrid edge — like blaster burns. Din shakes off a flash of visceral memory and strides through the rubble towards the lone figure that wanders the site, soot-blackened and smoke-streaked. His robes are paler now than at their first and so far only meeting, years before. Still, when he turns Din recognises the face behind the beard and the burden of age.

The Jedi says nothing and stares into his breastplate instead of his visor. He looks smaller. Less steady. It seems almost impossible that Din once watched this man take down a squadron of Dark Troopers untouched.

He takes another wary step closer and asks, “What happened here?”

“You’re the first,” the Jedi says, voice distant, rather than answer the question. There’s a blankness to his voice that resonates with the grimmest of Din’s memories. Unease prickles down his spine and his hand fists beside the sabre hilt hanging from his belt.

There are supposed to be children here. The last message from his informants mentioned a ship leaving the atmosphere during the night and blinking straight into hyperspace. Din had assumed, when he arrived and saw no evidence of them, that the little Jedi-in-training had been on board when it left, spirited away from the blaze — but the longer he stands here with the Jedi, the less he believes it.

“What happened?” he asks again, firmer this time.

The Jedi sighs, and somehow ages before Din’s eyes. “I thought there’d be more time …”

“Where’s the kid?” Din snaps. He can’t keep his voice steady any longer, and finally the Jedi lifts his head. He meets Din’s gaze, more or less, through the visor.

“Gone,” he says.

A pit opens in the bottom of Din’s stomach. A blade splits him from throat to belly. A fist clutches at his heart. He knows, he knows from the smell in the air and the terrible grief in the Jedi’s gaze, but he grits out another question anyway: “Gone where?”

“Gone,” the Jedi repeats. “One of the others I was training here — he destroyed everything. He left no one.”

“No,” Din says. He won’t accept it. He can’t.

“I looked for survivors,” the Jedi continues, daring to look at him and put compassion in his voice, when he promised the child would be safe in his care.

“No,” Din snarls. He whips around to look across the ruins. Trying to track heat signatures when there’s fire still smouldering is useless, but his helmet has other tricks. He strides deeper into the rubble, scanning with every sensor he’s got and calling out as he goes: “Grogu. Grogu!”

His voice is swallowed by the crackle of flames and the haze of smoke. He tries again. The kid always responded to his name. Always.

“I don’t feel his presence in the Force,” the Jedi says as he follows. “I’m sorry, he’s —”

Din spins around and thrusts a finger into the Jedi’s face. “Don’t tell me that.” He barely recognises his own voice. “You gave me your word. You said you’d protect him with your life. If any harm has come to him —”

Something cracks and splinters behind him. Din turns to see a section of fallen wall shifting. It looks like just another piece of the temple crumbling down, but then, instead of following the tug of gravity, the chunk of plaster and stone pushes up and out. He doesn’t breathe as it sails to one side. His visor latches on to movement in the smoky dark. It highlights in red a tiny figure, one arm raised, toddling forwards.

Din runs.

He’s moving even before the thought that Grogu is alive has crossed his mind, but it occurs to him halfway across the distance and his eyes sting. He thought he was dead. He thought he’d lost him, without even saying goodbye, without keeping his promise. Din crashes to his knees, sending up plumes of soot, and scoops the child into his arms. Grogu reaches for him in return and places little hands on either side of the helmet, gripping the sharp lines of the beskar. His skin is grey and black, but it’s only grime from the smoke and dust: beneath it there’s living, healthy green. There is no blood, no charring on his robes. He isn’t struggling to breathe. His eyes are huge and bright and he smiles —

Grogu smiles, and for a moment the world goes still.

It has been so long, and yet it feels exactly like the last time they were together. Din hadn’t realised, until now, that he’d been afraid. He’d worried that this feeling behind his ribs like the pain of a bruise would have dimmed with time and distance. It hasn’t. The fierce, protective instinct still burns behind his breastbone, lodged like a fatal wound against his heart. It won’t ever heal.

This is his child. His son. The Mandalorian words that were once spoken to him, that he has thought to himself whenever he wondered about Grogu’s life, are there at the tip of his tongue.

“It can’t be,” the Jedi murmurs. His footsteps crunch closer over the cinders. “I couldn’t sense him at all.”

Grogu’s big expressive ears turn downwards and his eyes narrow, fearful. Din brings the child closer to nestle against his breastplate, where he belongs, and then he stands and turns towards the Jedi. His free hand hovers near his blaster, and he makes no secret of it.

“What the hell happened here?” he asks for a third time. “What made one of your students go on a killing spree and burn this place to the ground?”

The Jedi hangs his head and says nothing.

“Grogu was hiding,” he says as a spur. “Not from another student. From you.”

The Jedi’s gaze snaps up. “What —”

“You couldn’t sense him. He only came out when he heard my voice. He wasn’t hiding from some other student who isn’t even here anymore. He’s afraid of you,” Din says, his voice rising with the fury of broken trust, and the Jedi flinches and looks away. Din growls, “Why?”

“I made a mistake,” the Jedi says with the air of a confession. He leans heavily against a ruined section of wall. “It was my nephew. He is extremely gifted, much like Grogu.”

His eyes dart to the figure against Din’s chest. At the mention of his name, Grogu looks, but at the same time he scrunches three-fingered hands into Din’s cowl like he’s afraid he might need to hold on. Din wants to tell him that he’s here, that it’s safe now, that he won’t let anything happen — but he also doesn’t want to interrupt the Jedi now he’s finally got him talking. He shushes the kid instead, and hopes he knows what he means.

“Last night I was sent a vision of great darkness surrounding him. My sister, his mother, has sensed such a thing before. Evil, swirling around him in the Force. It’s why she sent him here. I was supposed to help, but last night …” The Jedi stops to shake his head and when he speaks again his voice is thick with shame. “I was afraid. I let my fear guide me, and it led me to a dark path.”

Again, restless unease pours down Din’s back. He knows how this story ends: in fire and death. He asks, “What did you do?”

The Jedi closes his eyes. “I took my lightsaber.”

He stops and doesn’t say more, but Din understands. That the Jedi reached for a weapon tells him everything.

“You attacked one of your students?” he says, repulsed. Grogu makes a noise and looks away from his teacher, and Din knows the answer even before the Jedi’s head drops in a defeated nod.

“I couldn’t see a clear path,” he says. “I saw only darkness, and one way to bring back the light. I didn’t know what else to do. How else to stop him.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have,” Din snarls. The Jedi raised a weapon to one of his own, a child in his care. It’s unthinkable. No wonder the kid is scared. He adds, “Maybe the darkness around him was you.”

The words are barbed, and he means them to hurt, but he doesn’t expect them to hit so hard that the Jedi crumples. He sits heavily on a pile of blackened stones and puts his bare hand to his face. The other in its glove clutches the remains of the brickwork as if to keep him from falling further.

“Maybe you’re right,” he whispers.

Something about the way he says it shakes Din to his core.

“I’m taking the kid,” he says. It’s not what he came here to do, but it’s not like this is the first time he’s abandoned all his plans for Grogu’s sake. Besides, he’s not leaving his son in a ruined temple with a broken man who tried to kill one of his students over a bad dream. Grogu is coming with him, and it’s not up for discussion. If the Jedi doesn’t like it, he can try his luck and see how far he gets. This is the way.

However, the Jedi doesn’t argue. He just nods, wearily, without looking at them. Din leaves him there, in the ashes of the home he built and had a terrible hand in destroying, and walks away.

* * *

Grogu makes inquisitive humming sounds as they go up the ramp into the ship, but Din carries him straight to the cockpit rather than conduct a tour or let him explore. There’ll be time for that later. He deposits him in the rear seat and passes a gloved hand over his head, dusting away some of the grime. He’ll need to figure out a bath in the near future, too.

“Better buckle up, kid,” he murmurs before he tears himself away.

He speeds through the pre-flight checks, fingers skipping over the controls, and pilots them into the atmosphere. Grogu shrieks with glee behind him as the engines roar, and Din smiles and turns the simple ascent into a tight spin just to make the kid laugh. It feels right in a way that little has, since they parted company.

He’s glad when he breaks free from the planet’s gravity that he didn’t linger. The ship’s scanners pick up a couple of X-Wings coming in hot: the New Republic, finally moving on intel they must have had for hours. Bureaucracy at its finest.

Still, Din’s grateful for their red tape just this once. It means he got here first and collected the kid without the hindrance of law enforcement. However, they’re here now, and that means he shouldn’t be. He’s suddenly glad that the first ship he came to when he slipped away was an old rust bucket, and not one of Mandalore’s shiny new craft. He doesn’t want his people implicated in what happened here, even by hearsay. A flip of a switch engages the hyperdrive in the opposite direction before the X-Wings clock his presence, or at least before they can hail him. Din’s pretty sure they have bigger things to worry about, what with the smoking temple, but it’s not worth the risk when he can get away more-or-less clean.

He checks on the kid over his shoulder. Grogu is safely strapped into a harness made for a larger life-form, the blue-shifted streaks of stars reflected in his eyes, but he’s not looking out of the windows. He’s watching Din, and he gurgles something incomprehensibly content when he catches him looking.

Din smiles back, even though the kid can’t see it, and faces forward again to program the autopilot. When that’s done, he reaches into one of the many ammo pockets on his belt.

He pulls out a metal sphere with a round, threaded hole in one side. It’s scuffed and scored and ancient, a talisman from another time. He’s been carrying it for years. A lucky charm, if anyone asked, but really a promise to Grogu, and to himself. They had to see each other again, so that he could give the child this last surviving piece of the _Razor Crest_ , the home they had shared for so brief a time. He wanted Grogu to have something to remember him by. Fitting, really, that it’s just a piece of scrap. He hasn’t considered before whether it would mean anything at all to the kid, the way holding on to it has meant everything to him — but he hopes as he spins the pilot’s chair around and opens his gloved hand.

The child’s eyes light up and he burbles happily.

“You remember this, kid?” he asks, voice thick, and chuckles when Grogu reaches with both hands. He can’t wipe away the tears that fall behind the mask of his helmet. He doesn’t even want to.

The ball lifts from his palm and glides between them, slow and controlled.

“Nice job, Grogu,” Din grins, impressed and proud in equal measure. The kid beams at him and juggles the ball from hand to hand with the power of his mind. Din laughs. “You’re going to have to show me all your new tricks when we get home.”

“Buh,” the kid agrees, and Din’s heart soars.

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like I need to say that I really don’t hate Luke Skywalker, despite what this fic might imply. :S
> 
> I only finished watching _The Mandalorian_ last week, but since then I have tripped and fallen face-first into the fandom so I imagine there will be more fic forthcoming ... I'd like to write a sort-of-continuation of this set after TROS, and my brain has been throwing various fix-it flavoured ideas at me (my favourite) so we shall see. :)


End file.
